Direct Experience World-Model Optimization: Learning the World Beyond Action Imitation

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

World-Action Models (WAMs) couple action generation with predictions of how physical interactions unfold. However, current post-deployment learning paradigms typically improve behavior without requiring better world predictions. Especially in dexterous manipulation, small execution errors can compound in high-dimensional action spaces, hindering policy improvement and pushing interactions beyond the world model's training distribution. Motivated by this, we propose Direct Experience World-Model Optimization (DEWO), a post-deployment learning paradigm for WAMs that, alongside action imitation, refines world representations through visual experience to better condition action generation. Specifically, it identifies interaction turning points and learns from successful and failed futures to support classifier-free guidance. An additional value head estimates task progress from video representations and activates guidance when progress stalls during inference. Across five DexJoCo tasks, DEWO improves average success across all three WAM formulations. Ablations show that visual supervision from successful and failed continuations improves both prediction and control beyond action supervision alone. On four real-world tasks across Wuji and Sharpa, 3 x 3 grid evaluations show that two rounds of deployment learning increase success from 51.0% to 71.7% in cells with at least one initial success, a gain of 20.7 percentage points. These findings support continued predictive learning for improving control through deployment experience, making world modeling an active part of WAM adaptation.

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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